HPE 3PAR StoreServ Reviews

The most valuable feature for us is the ease of 3PAR's scalability. We have 330 different organizations within our company; we do anything and everything. That's why scalability of 3PAR is so important to us.

It provides us with on-demand service. For example, if we win a contract but don't have access to a service facility until midnight, we have to be able to "flood in" suddenly to keep the services running without any downtime. We have to be able to keep the systems running instantaneously and don't have the luxury of, say, a three-month provisioning or a new-chassis swap. So with 3PAR, we're able to provide on-demand service.

It needs to provide better customer visibility of what's going on. For example, having access to a customer's ticketing system if only on a real-time, read-only basis could be a perspective that's extremely helpful. It's important that we have clear and open lines of communications with our customers, and 3PAR doesn't provide that yet to meet our needs.

I first got involved with 3PAR in 2006.

We have a large number of HP storage products and 3PAR is by far the most stable. We do have a couple of clusters that have normal, standard discs, and these are so stable. We wanted something high-end, and that's why we went with 3PAR. If something goes wrong, we know it's not a hardware issue, but rather the software configuration that's running on it.

I'm normally used to reaching the point of a system where you just can't expand it any further and need to do a step change, swapping out a base unit or something like that. With 3PAR, that problem doesn't exist -- you just keep adding to it and capacity grows in a nice, linear fashion. If I want to add just a terabyte, I don't have to add 100 terabytes. Expansion of 3PAR is very, very smooth.

From an ownership perspective, I like the technical support HP provides because they're better engineers. The tech support structure is also not as clunky as with other organizations and there's a better spread of skill-sets amongst techs. So overall, technical support is pretty good.

If you speak to your techies, as opposed to your managers, and ask them how easy it is for them to use and understand 3PAR, they'll say it gets a 10/10. The techies get it and they love it.

For the P10400, we didn’t license many of the features that would have made this product really shine. We bought it for its advertised scalability, active-active controller design, and uptime (non-disruptive upgrades, port virtualization, etc.). We have not upgraded its capacity, controller count, or connection count since we’ve bought it so the scalability piece really didn’t make much difference for us. The uptime piece, however, has been 100% since initial start-up which is great. Although we cannot service the unit ourselves, cage level availability and the support team that takes care of the InForm OS updates and failed hardware have made it a great array for simply servicing I/O with nothing fancy added in.

The 7400 array is where things really start to shine for us on products and features. We initially bought this array as a production replacement of a set of EVA’s for file services and VMWare. As such it was important to us to have a reliable array that would balance itself, and was easier to upgrade than the P10400. It needed to support new OS’s fairly quickly and also have non-disruptive upgrades. We put that to the test when we added our test environment to the array. In that upgrade, only six months after initial purchase, it was very important that we could keep our test I/O from disrupting the production environment, so priority optimization became an important feature. We added two controllers, and doubled the size of the array to accommodate our test environment, and did so without downtime. The priority optimization is a real-time QoS component of the array that can be changed without disruption and takes effect in seconds. The six fibre ports per controller allow me to segregate I/O streams from VMWare and Windows to keep from having queue length and buffer issues or to simply balance out I/O load.

3PAR, in general, has helped us speed up deployments and better track our I/O consumption. We are able to speed up deployments because we are no longer having to install a vendor specific DSM/MPIO on top of the Microsoft OS or Linux ones as we did with the EVA line. System reporter allows us a more in depth look at our I/O utilization patterns in an easy to gather and archive way.

Licensing is still a pain point. It has gotten better, as any spindle count based licensing is capped at a certain number of spindles depending on the model of the array, but it is still expensive as you must buy every feature. Many of the arrays available from competitors come with just one or two licenses to buy which cover the entire array no matter the spindle count. The arrays are also not very user serviceable, which is something I miss about the EVA. A field tech must come out to replace a drive which is something I could do myself with the EVA.

I've used the P10400 for three years, and I would rate it 7/10. Alongside this, I've been using the 7400 for one and half years, and say it's 8/10.

Also, we are not currently using 3PAR flash storage but are planning an implementation. We are currently looking into flash to speed up our MS SQL for the logs and TempDB LUN’s. We are also looking into it as a possible future deployment for an as yet not deployed VDI implementation.

We didn’t encounter any issues with deployment. The pre-deployment guides were comprehensive and prepared us well for actual deployment of the product.

We have only expanded the 7400, doubling its size in disk and controller count, and did it without any issues.

None yet.

High. We have “proactive” support, so many times they are calling me about issues before or right as I see the alerts. Our account support manager reviews our environment twice a year to discuss any issues we have had and any recommendations from HP on how the systems are performing.

High. Updates to the InForm OS and firmware have gone off without incident. When something was wrong with the HBA ports resetting, they brought in additional resources from other areas to resolve it. The issue turned out to be a problem with the fibre channel switches fill word instead of the array.

We were using HP EVA and direct attached storage. Our EVA’s were getting old and needed to be replaced within a year or two. The push to replace them sooner came after our main production array crashed due to LUN ownership issues between the controllers. A lot of I/O was coming into the non-owning controller and so it would switch ownership. Since ownership was set to fail-over/fail-back it would just keep hoping back and forth. It was a problem with VMWare losing its MPIO configuration but that caused major issues with the array. True Active-Active controller design really became an important criteria after this incident.

Both. The v400 was a complex setup where the 7400 was much more straightforward. The v400 had many requirements for how cables were run, specific hole sizes and cuts in the raised floor tiles, and the installation guide that the HP Field Technicians used was either out of date or incorrect in several places causing installation to take longer than it should have. In contrast, the 7400 had none of the requirements, as it was mounted in a more traditional style rack and the installation process was more mature. The service processor could now be deployed as a VMWare appliance and set up by the customer ahead of time.

We used a vendor team with in-house support where needed. The vendor team was much more knowledgeable on the 7400 installation than the v400. We had bought the v400 not long after HP acquired 3PAR so there were some issues there. However, the local installation team had a “quick” line into 3PAR support for installation so we weren’t waiting around for support to answer questions.

It was never calculated for these arrays outside of cost to buy new against the cost of continuing support of the existing arrays. It has been several years since we upgraded the class of array and type of support.

The original setup was about $700,000 for the v400 and $350,000 for the 7400. The day to day cost is negligible in terms of support as they are really stable arrays.

We evaluated the Hitachi VSP and Netapp FAS 6800.

Do your homework and follow the deployment guides, it will save time and headaches. If you do not license at least Direct Optimization the array cannot re-level the data so the array will eventually not preform to peak efficiency as you add and remove data.

We are a telecom company. We are using the tool mainly for processing applications.

The virtualization environment is good. The compression features are good. The tool provides data-tiering features. It is a middle-level storage solution. It is good enough. We do not face any problems with it. The performance and reliability are okay.

If we have two different types of disks, only one data-tiering is possible. The product must accept any type of disk. The solution must be vertically and horizontally expandable. It is not possible currently.

I have been using the solution for the last ten years.

The solution is stable.

Scalability is possible with only the existing drives. The product does not accept the latest drives like the NVMe drives. We have 15 users.

The support is good.

Positive

The solution is easy to deploy. The deployment takes a reasonable amount of time. We need one architect to deploy the tool. It is easy for one person to maintain the tool.

The tool’s price is higher compared to other products. The solution is 20% more expensive than other storage.

We use Dell and HPE. I prefer Hitachi for scalability reasons. Hitachi accepts drives like HDD, NVMe, and SSD. Hitachi is the best tool.

We are partners. After we give the inputs to evaluate and ask the commercial to the presales team, they take a lot of time to respond. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

The tool is fast and easy to use. You can also configure it easily. The product also has good performance tuning. 

The tool needs improvement in the utilization report at the granular level. 

I have been working with the solution for one year. 

The product is stable. 

The tool is scalable. 

The customer support team is good. They give timely responses and if need be they also share screens and provide support.

The initial setup was very easy.

I would recommend this tool to other users, consumers, or customers.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The StorServ is the main storage for our infrastructure. Our ERP system runs on it, as well as 15 other servers including Active Directory, synchronization servers, and more.

The performance is very good. This is a full-flash storage device and it is very quick.

HPE monitors each storage device and if there are any problems, such as an issue with a hard drive, the technical support will quickly and proactively contact us to change the part.

The price of this solution should be lower.

We have been using our current HPE 3PAR for the past year and a half. For the previous six years, we had an older version of 3PAR storage.

3PAR is a stable product. We have used the current device and an older version for more than seven years and although we had accidents with nodes and hard drives, it is high-availability storage. We never had a blackout and we have never been offline.

With respect to the capacity, it is easy to add to. We just have to get more boxes with hard drives. We have quite a small environment so, in terms of scalability, it's okay for us. We have never needed to expand.

There are four of us who administer the 3PAR. I am an IT manager and I have three colleagues in my team.

The technical support is tremendous.

I have worked with other storage products from Dell, although that was more than ten years ago. The reason that we switched to HPE was the comparison between performance and price.

The 3PAR is high-level storage and at the time, it was cheaper than the competitors.

The implementation was done by our partner and it took less than a day to complete. It was deployed within approximately five hours.

The deployment was completed by a gold HPE partner. They delivered the storage devices in addition to the ESXi servers that we ordered.

Any maintenance that needs to be done, such as updating the firmware on the devices, is the responsibility of our external partner. We don't have experience in this field.

This product is quite expensive and in addition, we subscribe to 24/7 support with a four-hour response time.

HPE is a vendor that I recommend in general, and especially for storage solutions.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Generally, clients use the solution as primary storage or data storage for corporations. They also use it for data replication where they replicate to another site or even on the same site. They're typically replicating the data for a backup situation.

The solution has greatly assisted data performance as far as a VM-ware environment goes. My data performance is much faster.

One of the features that I like the most is the data replication element. The reason I like it is due to the fact that it's pretty clean on replicating data over to a second site. 

The product stands on its own in heavy enterprise environments. 

It's easy to make changes without affecting the environment.

The solution is very easy to use.

The product is very robust and offers very good performance.

HP has several integration elements that work with other vendor storage products. I'd like to see a greater expansion on that so that a customer can do a more seamless migration from other vendor products. The migration of data to their platform could be better.

Primarily they don't have a lot. They have several EMC elements that they can migrate data from, however, there are many more controllers out there and it'd be good to see a more seamless integration so that that could occur.

I'd like to see 3PAR have some integration with Cloud services.

I've been using the solution for several years. It's been probably around seven years or so. It has definitely been a while.

The stability is pretty decent. The only thing you have to worry about is that you don't overtax the controller. In other words, you don't do that combination of deduping and compression as well as data replication and then also heavily use the controllers where your IO starts, the IO performance. With IOPS and Truepoint, it's important that users do not over-utilize the environment. Then you have performance issues. 

You have to be careful about exactly what your usage is. You really need to understand what you want to do with the controller. You need to understand what your total IOP performances will be, before you do any sizing so that you can size appropriately, otherwise, as with any storage, you could have an underutilized controller. That would then cause you frustration and business units would suffer as you would have slower performance than what you expected.

A lot of times customers get themselves in trouble due to the fact that they make a purchase or size a controller and then later on they undersized it. Sometimes the under-sizing can occur due to the fact that a company starts putting more demand on the new stores where they want to put one more device on the storage product or connect to it, and that wasn't what it was sized for at the time. If you didn't plan on the growth of the utilization of the controllers the product doesn't look like it's performing properly, however, indeed it is. It's just, not big enough to handle the new user profile that you have put on it.

Microsoft Exchange, VMware, SQL, and Oracle - those are the types of software or devices that are applications that were used within our environment. We have several different departments or groups that get access to that storage.

There were some older 3PARs that we wanted to replace and there were some Clariion EMC products that we wanted to replace. The reason why was due to the fact that the 3PARs, were four years old and we needed a technology revamp, so to speak. 

The other reason we switched was that EMC was just too slow. It was getting overwhelmed and we had to go to a stronger or newer technology controller. Therefore we decided to go with the 3PAR as it was a lot easier to use. We also liked the virtualization of the product and we appreciated the ease of being able to make changes without having an overall effect in the environment.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not too complex. If you have any SAN experiences pretty easy, as you have to understand some of the terminologies so that you can pre-prep the architectural design that you're looking for. Overall, however, it's pretty easy from a GUI perspective. You can do everything from a GUI. You don't need to play at the CLI level. Of course, if you'd like to do that, you can do that as well.

I typically handle implementations for my clients.

I'm a consultant and an HPE partner and I have my hands on several different things in terms of products I use.

Normally I work with all the versions as far as software versions. I've worked with all the different hardware, 3PAR versions as well, and I do a lot of installations.

The big thing and with 3PAR and with any other storage - and this goes for any kind of storage as you're sizing - is to make sure that you are getting the right size environment for what you currently have and what you expect for future growth. Otherwise, you may run into performance issues.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at a nine. We've been quite happy with the solution so far. It's robust and offers very good performance.

We use 3PAR as the primary storage in our environment for all our Tier 1 applications.

We have been using it since 2015. It has performed well. You guys have gotten a lot better with the 8000 and 20000 series.

We design a lot of our DR and business continuity strategy around 3PAR Peer Persistence and other copy services.

The most valuable features are their tight integration with VMware, their multi-node architecture, and their copy services, such as Peer Persistence. We are a big MetroCluster user.

I would like to see the following:

• NVMe support, not only on the disk side, but also in the NVMe over Fibre Channel.
• More advanced copy features.
• A few user improvements on their SSMC product.
• Mesh-Active, which I hear is coming.

One improvement that they could do right now is with the way they do their metric clustering. With Peer Persistence, they use a Lua. It would be really nice to have a volume that is truly Active-Active in both of our data centers.  

It has been quite a stable product, which is why we continue to invest in it.

It definitely scales.

We use HPE technical support. We have gotten every question answered, so they have been helpful.

We were look for a refresh. At the time, IBM was not keeping up with their VMware integration, especially with VVols. It was quite obvious that HPE was a leader in it, and this steered us into looking at them. Then, we found out that the product could do everything we needed it to do.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

For the price that we were able to acquire it, we have seen it give us the performance and stability that we require to run our enterprise. They have also added features, such as the compression and duplication, which have further increased our ROI.

NetApp, Pure Storage, and IBM. We chose HPE because they checked all the boxes.

Nine out of 10 times, the system does exactly what we need it to do.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Knowing that the product works. We like to choose bigger companies. We do not like to invest in startups because you never know if they will be acquired. 

We have a good existing relationship with HPE, which was a lot of what steered us toward using them in the storage space.

Our primary use for 3PAR is virtualization, SQL Server data, and backup logs. We also use it for our Citrix VDI environment.

We have been using 3PAR for two years. It has been performing as expected. We are actually getting ready to invest a big chunk of money to expand our 3PAR.

It has improved multiple things. Integration with current HPE products that we have, e.g., backups with integration within Veeam and restores of a huge file server using Veeam. Across the board, it has helped with more than just serving data, but also with recovery.

• Ease of use
• Ease of training for my new staff and junior level staff.
• The support that we receive from HPE.

I would like more integration with OneView. I would also like to be able to deploy and manage 3PAR within OneView Global Dashboard so we do not have to use the interface for 3PAR. Overall, I would like more integration, which I think is coming.

It meets and exceeds all my expectations. It is easy to scale. It is fairly inexpensive to scale. It easily does whatever I need it to do.

When we have a failed drive or any failure, we receive emails and do not have to open cases. 

They make the replacement of any parts easy along with the analysis of any issues with the servers, 3PARs, and any upgrades which need to be happening, in addition to any detrimental performance issues.

We previously had Dell Compellent. We switched because we were using HPE Compute and HPE Blades, and it seemed like we might as well go all in on HPE. Also, we were not getting what we thought we wanted for performance out of Compellent.

It was the easiest SAN that I have ever set up.

I do not know if I can put a number on it. When we buy products, we do not put ROI on it. It is more performance, and does it meet our business needs? 

This product has been exceeding anything else that we have had in the environment firsthand.

Give 3PAR a good consideration. Budget wise, 3PAR is a lot of money compared to other solutions, but what is in the 3PAR integration that customers are getting now from the Nimble and InfoSight acquisitions, it is worthwhile.

This system has been (by far) the easiest to use, manage, and expand.